What Kate Thinks

I’m usually not overly enthused about the deep sea until someone points out just how awesome its creatures are. Often the word awesome can be replaced with “alien” or “creepy.” In the case of the hagfish, they’re all true.

I very much appreciate that someone already gave myxine glutinosa the nickname I would have assigned them: slime eels. They secrete a goop that prevents them from getting eaten, and it works like a charm (as evidenced by the video below).

These creatures have a skull, no vertebral column, and spend their days sliming predators and prey alike. If they’re lucky they get to spend some of their time eating whale carcasses.

Mmmmm summer. I’m sure I, like many people, associate many tastes with summer. For now though, towards the (let’s just go ahead and say it, we are over the half-way point, after all) end of May, the only thing that tastes like summer is rhubarb.

I have good memories of summers gone by, and I was thrilled when a coworker commandeered some rhubarb for me in addition to the rather small patch we’ve got in the back yard. Perhaps the only taste that comes as close to the memory of summer is strawberry, but even that I’m convinced has more to do with its rhubarb affiliations than anything else.

With the warm and sunny weather, occasional thunderstorm and the promise of a night in watching a movie, last night seemed prime for rhubarb cake making. I will not publish my recipe, as it’s not mine to reveal in the first place (it’s Hope’s mom’s for those keeping score at home).

The compote was all mine though. After a dozen Google searches taught me that a compote is not, as I was always led to believe, fancy, I just threw some big pieces of strawberry and rhubarb in a pot over low heat. I ended up with about 1-1.5 cups of each fruit, plus 1/3 cup sugar or so. After a minute or two it looked like this:

Then after a few more minutes it looked like this:

After just a few more minutes, it was a beautiful, vibrant pink that just begged to be put on otherwise boring colored foods: oatmeal, toast, ice cream…

By this time my cake was also done, and I assure you the pictures do not do it justice. There is enough love provided in the recipe being passed to my care to make this cake delicious enough to not warrant the 1/2 cup of lard and brown sugar it includes. And yet, they all find a way to live happily ever after in this cake:

Then I took all my great ideas and put them together in what truly is my personal taste of summer:

Okay, I admit it. I judged this book by its cover. Lucia Perillo’s I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature came as a surprise in a package from my uncle, who had read it and thought I might like it. Maybe it the Golden Girls-like color scheme. Maybe it the mythical looking bird. Maybe it was just the inclusion of the word “poetry” right there on the front of the book. I still can’t be sure, but I was skeptical of the recommendation.

The first chapter was an introduction to Perillo’s life before MS, as a park ranger who “loved nothing more than to hike the Cascade Mountains alone, taking special pride in her daring solo skis down the raw, unpatrolled slopes of Mount Rainier.” In her thirties, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, changing her life dramatically as she finds herself confined to a wheelchair and reliant on others at every turn.

The second chapter was about gulls. It was an entire chapter devoted to a woman watching gulls who wishes that she didn’t have to watch gulls. It was horrible. I smugly congratulated myself on judging the book’s cover correctly, and kept reading.

Chapter 3, entitled “Definition of Terms,” Perillo delves into the semantic challenge of describing her current state of being. Crippled? Handicapped? Disabled? My smugness waned as my legophilia kicked in, and I plowed through to chapters about attempted treatments, her experiences as a “cripple in the wilderness,” and comparisons of the plights of Job and Prometheus. The more I read, the more I appreciated her writing and thoughtfulness.

In the chapter “Fear of the Market” she writes about poetry as a career. While she directly mentions poetry, Perillo puts words to a sentiment writers and artists everywhere can understand:

“My parents’ trouble stems from the fact that the value of even the most famous poems cannot be assessed, their worth being nil to much of our culture partly because their medium, language, is so ephemeral and cheap–and has been suspect almost as far back as its inception for being capable of pulling the wool over our eyes.”

Perillo infuses her prose with poetry, writing gracefully and humorously about her life. I wouldn’t say I learned my lesson about judging books by their covers–I’m still totally going to do that. I’ll probably be right some of the time, too. I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing was well-worth the read.

I joined a book club some friends had organized for the sake of reading more and reading more socially. I started writing this post before we gathered and discussed Freakonomics, partly so my own views wouldn’t be manipulated too much. Then the discussion was cancelled, partly due to scheduling and partly due to general lack of enthusiasm for this particular read. So, here’s my overall verdict, void of outside influences: meh.

Freakonomics purports to be a “rogue” economists views on everything. My first issue comes with the premise that investigating thoroughly is a “rogue” activity. I dislike and am discouraged by the idea that there is only one pair of economists out there interested in more complete investigations into causation. Levitt and Dubner, on the other hand, seem to believe that economists are wont to find a plausible explanation and stop there, rather than exhaust their resources to find every plausible explanation and then start the hard work of determining which of the many possibilities actually makes the most sense.

My other issue (aside from glowing reviews of the book introducing each chapter and the fact that I can’t quite tell what exactly Stephen J. Dubner’s did to contribute to this book–he’s credited as a co-author but shares none of the accolades?) is that the book boils down to a list of fun facts explained. The most controversial example was that crime rates dropped significantly after abortions were legalized nation-wide. Mothers who were statistically more likely to have children who were criminals were simply not having those children. Therefore, 18-24 years (the ages of peak criminal activity) after Roe v Wade, there was less criminal activity because there were fewer criminals. Interesting?–yes. Worthy of an entire book rather than, say, a blog?–maybe not.

All in all, Freakonomics has the same appeal as books written by Malcolm Gladwell (who calls Steven Levitt the “most interesting mind in America”), which is to say mildly interesting and incredibly fast to read.

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve moved into the fancy-pants zone, bike-wise. I’ve been on just a couple of rides, but so far I think I like it. More importantly, we (my bike and I) look great in our new digs:

The shoes are absolutely ridiculous before and after I get on my bike, but while they’re attached to machinery fulfilling their life’s work, they’re great:

I finished Philip Roth’s American Pastoral a few months ago and I nearly forgot to write this post. I read Portnoy’s Complaint by Roth a while ago, and liked it enough to try another of his novels.

American Pastoral‘s first section is titled “Paradise Remembered.” Seymour “The Swede” Levov has a perfect life–all-star high school athlete, beauty queen wife and successful business. Then he has a daughter. A daughter who was the greatest joy and treasure of the Swede’s life, until she becomes a teenager interested in radical opposition to American status-quo of the late 1960s. In the middle section, “The Fall,” she turns violent in her expression of political ideals. This turn causes strife in Swede’s otherwise realized American Dream.

“Paradise Lost” follows the family through their coping (or non-coping) with the shock that ruptured any sense of normalcy they once enjoyed. Roth does a wonderful job of conveying the desperation and anger the Swede faces with emotional poignancy and eloquence only a world-class author can deliver. I marked one passage in particular that challenged my ability to function normally the rest of the day:

“Yet hers was another life broken cleanly in two… What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that mde them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich, and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human being lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.”

Rereading, I’m still struck by how possible it seems to the Swede that the cruelty and injustice of the world is somehow more authentic than the joy and compassion.

As I write this, I’m peripherally listening to NPR’s On Being broadcast. Today’s program is about end of life care and existence. I’m struck by how possible it seems to the interviewees in this program that the joy and compassion of life, while as real as the cruelty and injustice, are infinitely more significant.

If we get to choose–and I believe we do–I choose the latter view, that joy and compassion have the ability to shape our lives in ways disproportionate to pain and sorrow.

I got a clipless pedal set up for my bike. They’re the opposite of training wheels, with a distinctive you-better-know-what-the-hell-you’re-doing attitude about them. Slowly but surely, the whole mechanism is coming together:

I believe I just need one more tool to complete the set-up, then it’s adjusting and riding and adjusting and falling and riding and adjusting and then riding. I hope I love them.

Vi Hart’s video on star math reminds me of the Spirograph I had as a kid, and of how much I loved that the very middle of my most complex designs was a simple circle. Though my enjoyment of the toy definitely decisively stopped where Wikipedia’s “Math Basics” header begins, I appreciate how Vi Hart visualizes and explains the gist of those basics. I’ve always thought math was most fun when other people did it. I was far better at spectating than participating anyway.

While the path from routine to rut can be slippery, I want to focus on routines in their positive light today.

They can be helpful, like when I’m half asleep (read: body awake and brain asleep) in the morning and can perform my “getting ready for work” routine on autopilot. They can be comforting, like when I arrive at work and make my individual-sized French press coffee. Sure, we have a community coffee pot that is always full by the time I get in, but I still make the French press. It’s satisfyingly fussier, and I like it as part of my morning routine.

Some routines are surprising, like what happens after my evening run. It turns out that lately, frequently, it’s been this:

I’m not sure what prompted this combination of consumables, but it’s absolutely wonderful. After I run, I get this snack together then plop on the couch, take off my shoes, calculate how far I ran, and watch a show while alternating snacking and stretching.

Saturdays I’ve been making tortillas to stockpile in the freezer. I still have to look up the recipe each time, but in another week or so I’ll have committed it to memory through sheer repetition. I made this gem recently:

Saturdays I also go to the resale shop down the street to poke around for new seasonal and work-appropriate attire in the ever-changing inventory. Wednesdays I try to catch up on my correspondence. Pay day I try to take stock of my progress on paying off my student loans. Sundays I try to make a few lunches for the week.

This post is about nothing fancy, and nothing particularly interesting. This post is more for me than you, I suppose. I wanted to write about the benefit of routine to remind me that writing is among the good habits I should incorporate more seriously into my routines. So look for more posts, and if you’re a local and looking for some delicious tortilla-based snacks, give a ring.

We’re mobile people. Not we humans, not we Americans, not we Adam and I. We twenty and thirty-somethings, we the employed, we the non-parents.

I realized this as I waited for keys to an apartment to New York to arrive in Minneapolis, eagerly anticipating a visit with my friends from Berlin, whom I haven’t seen since Adam and I ventured to San Francisco.

With keys in hand, we headed to the airport. While I am not a big fan of 4:30am, I do like flying. I spent the entire flight staring out the window, mouth gaping at what may be on my top ten list of favorite advancements in technology.

Upon arrival, Adam and I made a series of jokes, all with the general punchline that we bumpkins think JFK is actually NYC and gosh isn’t everything just so big and impressive? It only took us a couple hours to get a real view of the city, from the top of 30 Rock:

After fifteen miles of walking all over Manhattan, weaving in and out of the slowest walking New Yorkers (they can’t all be tourists), we caught a beer ($3.50) and talked about how sometimes places surprise you. We ate Greek food. We visited with friends. We went to a bar and realized that we had collectively slept only 5.5 hours in the past 40 hours, then called it quits.

The following day we saw some other It’s My First Time In New York places–Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art via Central Park. We finally got to meet up with our German friends over dinner. Upon seeing them, I remembered distinctly how Skype is no substitute for a real conversation, and not even on the map of comparable to hugging a dear friend you haven’t seen in years.

Eventually we made our way home via subway and learned that there are Doozers that patrol the tunnels looking for loose bolts. We also learned that there are subway cars filled with garbage that run very late at night.

After Chinatown, we wrangled a ride touring the Upper West and Upper East sides of Manhattan. Then we hit up Dine in Brooklyn and I ate this beautiful trout, apples, leek, lentils and chorizo:

We walked all up and down Manhattan on our last day in town and then enumerated some classic New York stereotypes: 1 cockroach, 1 subway rat and 1 street hot dog. Special New York moments: seeing friends. I’ve known these people for years, hadn’t seen them for years, and live between 1,000 and 4,500 miles apart.

Being mobile is amazing–we can go anywhere! Do anything! All it takes is time and money. (Am I being snarky? You’ll never know.)

It’s not often I read something that requires me to double check to make sure I didn’t write it myself. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has done it, though, in her most recent post You Will Obey. She so aptly wrote a post I would have written that I don’t feel the need to repeat myself in inferior words.

If you are a knitter and do not read Yarn Harlot’s blog, you must begin immediately. Stephanie is an expert who writes well and with humor.

A while ago Adam and I made a deal that if we’re going to keep me in an apartment with a small yard, we have to make sure I get walked regularly. When we don’t do this, I get restless and act out by gnawing on Adam’s shoes and peeing on the carpet.

Without fail, every time I take a hiatus from exercise, for whatever lame reason, I end up remembering that I don’t need to carve out time to sit more in a day. If I do too much sitting, I get restless and cranky and every way I sit is uncomfortable. I also can’t think clearly. Consequently it takes me a while to realize that a little activity could be the solution to all my woes.

Bodies want to move–nay, they need to move. It’s easier said than done, but that’s not to say it’s hard to do. My muscles will feel sore after exercising, but they’ll also feel grateful. I heard somewhere that it isn’t exercise that makes your muscles sore, it’s a lack of exercise that makes your muscles sore.

On that note, I’ve taken a cue from a couple of friends and started being more diligent about running. I ran two days ago and ended up with sore calves. I summoned some will power and concluded that my aching calves required a run, so I went out again yesterday. My legs are still tired today, but no more so than two days ago. The problem of sore from running begets the solution of running more, so off I go again today.